Low-cost interventions for promoting forgiveness

It is a truism of social and clinical psychology that norm-violating interpersonal behavior can cause behavioral, psychological, health-related problems for victims. Serious life events caused by other people-violent crime, for example-can of course have long-standing effects, but even less overtly harmful events such as hurt feelings (Leary, Springer, Negel, Ansell, & Evans, 1998), social exclusion (Leary, Cottrell, & Phillips, 2001; Twenge, Catanese, & Baumeister, 2003), and rejection (Nolan, Flynn, & Garber, 2003) can elicit sadness, depression, anger, anxiety, and other negative outcomes. For example, discovering that one's spouse has been sexually unfaithful is associated with a sixfold increase in the likelihood of being diagnosed with a major depressive disorder (Cano & O'Leary, 2000) and being humiliated is associated with a 70% increase in the likelihood of major depressive disorder (Kendler, Hettema, Butera, Gardner, & Prescott, 2003).